


Carnival

by ficlicious



Series: The Stars Through Her Soul (Lonely Is the Soul Remix) [1]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Carnival of Crime, F/M, Faded Soulmarks, Female Tony Stark, First Dates, Gen, Howard Stark's Good Parenting, Multi, Reimagining, Remix, Rhodey Is a Good Bro, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-03
Updated: 2016-08-03
Packaged: 2018-07-29 03:23:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7668259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ficlicious/pseuds/ficlicious
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Toni is eight, she falls out of a tree. One minute, she’s outlining the delicate circuitry of a theoretical miniaturized arc reactor, the next minute, she’s plunging to the ground. Just for a second, a brief fleeting glimpse of hope, she knows she’s going to be caught.</p><p>She can’t remember the incident, will never remember the incident in anything but hazy snippets and fragments of sound and motion, but she will always carry the betrayed sense of confusion she felt, like someone should have been there to catch her, to save her, but wasn’t.</p><p>-------</p><p>The long-demanded remix of <i>The Stars Through Her Soul</i>. What Stars might have been, if one very small thing had been different.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Carnival

**Author's Note:**

  * For [silvershadowkit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/silvershadowkit/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The Stars Through Her Soul](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5660458) by [ficlicious](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ficlicious/pseuds/ficlicious). 



> I've had this in bits and pieces, sitting on my cloud drive for awhile. It's not complete, but I stitched what I had together and here you are. 
> 
> I'm going to treat it like I treat _**Aftermath**_ and write it as a serial. This first fic, _Carnival_ , I'll post in three chapters, which my already-available fic, _Radioactive_ will follow. 
> 
> Please enjoy. And, as always, I love comments, so leave one if you like. :)

_The Stars Through Her Soul (Lonely is the Soul Remix)_

friends will keep you sane,  
love could fill your heart,  
a lover can warm your bed,  
but lonely is the soul without a mate

— David Pratt

When Toni is seven, her soulmarks appear. They’re pale, wan, washed out things, faded stars that might have been red and white at one point, but are now barely visible at their brightest. She cries for days while Mama strokes her hair and whispers, “You do not need soulmates, _passerotta_. You are a Raffaeli, and our women are made of iron.”

Toni doesn’t believe Mama, but the gentle stroke of Mama’s fingers through her hair, and the warm, comforting rhythm of her voice soothes Toni back into slumber, tear tracks drying on her cheeks.

———

When Toni is eight, she falls out of a tree. She is supposed to be with Mrs. Jarvis, learning how to be a proper girl, but she is instead hiding with her sketchbooks and her head full of diagrams and designs in the branches of a sturdy oak, thirty feet off the ground. She isn’t sure how it happens. One minute, she’s outlining the delicate circuitry of a theoretical miniaturized arc reactor, the next minute, she’s plunging to the ground. Just for a second, a brief fleeting glimpse of hope, she knows she’s going to be caught.

She wakes up six weeks later in a hospital bed with two broken legs, a shattered pelvis, and a head injury that has the doctors clucking about brain damage and functional impairment. Miraculously, once she completes a year-long course of physical therapy, she is completely recovered. 

She can’t remember the incident, will never remember the incident in anything but hazy snippets and fragments of sound and motion, but she will always carry the betrayed sense of confusion she felt, like someone should have been there to catch her, to save her, but wasn’t.

"Learn to rely on yourself," Daddy tells her, as he carefully helps her sit on the tall stool at the drafting table in his workshop and rests his arm around her in a loose embrace. "You are brilliant and resourceful, Antonia. You can trust other people to help you, but you are the only one who will ever be there all the time. Do you understand?"

It's been a year, but she's still bewildered sometimes by his affection, a constant presence now, since the day she woke up from her coma. Mama says he's making up for lost time, that he realized when she nearly died how precious she is to him. It's strange, but she likes it. "Yes, Daddy," she says, and leans into his warm hug. "I understand."

———

At twelve, Tiberius Stone declares that she’s going to marry him, and he’ll take over Stark Industries. Toni laughs in his face. She may be twelve, but she can already see the shape of the future. Stone the Senior is desperate, but he’ll find no sympathy in the Stark household. Mama might have at least paid lip service to the Stone family troubles, but Mama’s been in the ground for nearly two years. Daddy says Toni has her wide, compassionate heart, but Toni knows she also has Daddy’s broad, ruthless pragmatism.

“I’m going to inherit Stark Industries,” she tells Ty loftily, as his face turns red and his scowl deepens. “And probably buy Viastone for a song when your father runs it into the ground.”

———

At sixteen, Toni has nearly completed two Masters degrees in neural computing and robotics, and her Bachelor’s in quantum physics. She has a year of MIT under her belt, at least two more to go, and she is having the time of her life.  She’s earning a bit of a reputation as a party girl, but despite the rumors, she’s not out every week drinking and dancing. In fact, she barely does that at all. Even for a mind of her caliber, completing three PhDs in three years is damn hard work. Most people would be astonished to learn that Toni Stark, who can throw a full-scale gala at the drop of a hat, spends most of her time with her nose in books or elbow-deep in circuits and wires, and that most of her party-of-the century bashes are actually thrown for other people.

Rhodey approves, but she thinks that’s because it means Rhodey also gets a lot of studying done. Daddy may be paying him to chaperone Toni in Boston — Rhodey will never have to worry about student loans again, at the very least — but his education is important to him, and Toni’s happy to not make him chase her all over creation just to ensure someone doesn’t abduct or assault her.

Toni isn’t sure where her father found him, but she likes Rhodey, a lot. He’s smart. Not on her level, because few people are, but she can appreciate his intelligence and unique approach to problem-solving without making it a competition. He’s funny, and sarcastic, and he’s secure enough in his own masculinity to buy tampons without complaint once a month because Toni never remembers until it’s too late.

And what’s probably the most important: he and Toni get along like houses on fire. He understands her moods, he accommodates her eccentricities, he makes her want to be a better person, so she is, for him. She tries to be mindful of his exams, tries to remember that he operates on a normal person schedule and needs to sleep when she’s wired at 3am and raring to build something. All in all, he’s the perfect soulmate for her, if she believed in such useless, bullshit things. Too bad it’d be about as creepy as being soulbonded to a blood sibling. She’d marry him on the spot if either of them thought there was ever a chance something more would grow between them.

Nothing ever will. Rhodey is family, a brother, a confidante, her best friend in the world. They don’t need anything more, no matter how many whispers speculate otherwise.

Still, after Rhodey comes moping back to their townhouse after one failed date too many, and Toni cancels her plans for the sixth time in two months to stay home and eat ice cream with him, she decides that, if the time comes that they’re thirty and still single, she’s going to marry him anyway. Soulmates may be bullshit, she thinks, but Rhodey’s a good life partner, with or without the romance. And if no other woman is perceptive enough to see that, well, she has absolutely no problem capitalizing on their blindness.

She completes her PhD in quantum mechanics two weeks shy of her seventeenth birthday, and Rhodey takes her to the circus a couple towns over to celebrate. She’s barely seen anything but the campus and their townhouse for the last few weeks; her doctoral thesis, a complicated dissertation on solid state applications in electronic engineering, stretched even her nigh-inexhaustible creativity and intellect to its limits. It’s one of the very rare times in her life when her brain is wiped completely out, and a night on the town seems like just what the doctor ordered.

**oOoOoOo**

Clint is bored.

Truth be told, he's been bored for a long time. Half his life, it seems, he's a performing monkey for ever-smaller crowds. The other half, he's on the move with the carnival, heading to the next town in the middle of nowhere. It's not that he's ungrateful to Maynard and the others for taking him in. It’s not that he doesn’t enjoy showing off for oohing and aahing spectators. It’s just that he’s starting to wonder if this is _really_ what he’s going to do for the rest of his life.

Then again, it isn’t like he has much choice. Oh, he’s sure he could make it on his own, but without a high school diploma, his job options are seriously limited. He’s good with a bow, but this isn’t the Middle Ages, and opportunities for archers aren’t all that common.

Sometimes, he wonders if he’s actually bored, because it feels more like he’s frustrated with the hopeless rut, and the endless future yawning in front of him like a black chasm, of squeezing into spandex and doing trick shots for the masses until he’s old and grey, blind with age and too weak to lift his bow anymore.

He shudders violently at that mental image, shying away from the thought of ever being old, and mentally chides himself. He’s nineteen, for chrissake. Lots of time before time steals his one true, prized skillset.

He’s finished his shows for the day, so he wanders amongst the game booths, past the cheesy-as-hell Tunnel of Love, and past the carousel piping its calliope music, hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans. His restless feet take him past the funhouse and he threads his way through the scattered crowd of giggling kids coming out, still shoving at each other with mocking comments about how they’d all looked in the warped, distorting mirrors.

Clint shakes his head and glares at the ground in front of the worn toes of his sneakers as he moves past the group. Maybe _that_ was his problem. Most of the people around his age who had been with the circus had left months or years ago, settling in one town for school, or departing altogether for college. How they managed it, Clint would never know, but he knew it wasn’t an option for him. Full circle back to being trapped.

He bites off a curse under his breath and spins on his heel to go back to his trailer. If Maynard catches him out in this mood, it won’t matter that no one ever recognizes him in street clothes. He’ll get torn a new asshole for raining on happy customers’ good experiences, and as a member of the carnival, blah blah blah. Clint’s got the whole speech memorized by now. He doesn’t need to hear it again.

The smell of cotton candy hits his nose a second before a body crashes into him from the side, and the cotton candy smell grows overpowering. He grunts in surprise, echoed by a soft, feminine yelp, and reflexive yanking his hands out of his pockets to catch the person who’d stumbled into him. He catches a double handful of cotton candy instead, and a forehead bangs into his chin.

He reels back with another bitten-off epithet, clutching at his chin before he remembers his hand is coated with cotton candy. He closes his eyes and slowly lowers his hand, feeling spun sugar stretch between his cheek and fingers, sticky and gritty.

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry!” says an alarmed, definitely female voice.

He grits his teeth, reminding himself that carnival guests are more important in Maynard’s opinion than he is. “It’s okay,” he says, and mostly succeeds in not sounding as irritated as he feels. He opens his eyes, forcing a smile. “Accidents hap—oh.”

The rest of his insincere platitudes die in his throat, along with the air from his lungs. She’s not the most gorgeous girl he’s ever seen — and he’s seen plenty, because buxom blonde cheerleaders and cornfed Harvest Queens are a dime a dozen on the carnival circuit — but something about her steals his breath like someone just socked him in the chest. She’s all worried blue eyes in a heart-shaped face, framed with long, dark hair clipped back in gold-and-red barrettes and accented by the embarrassed flush across her cheeks. She looks familiar, but he’s never been to this town before. No way he could know her.

He needs to remedy that.

“I’m so sorry,” she says again, and fumbles at the pocket of her faded jeans, whipping out an honest-to-god handkerchief and wetting it with her bottle of water. “I’m such a klutz, I swear I shouldn’t be allowed near people.”

“That’d be a shame,” he hears himself say, not so much suave as blurted out in blind panic. “Not that you’re a klutz. Or that you’d stop being a klutz. But that you wouldn’t be near people. You look like you should be. Around people, I mean.” He’s horrified to discover he can’t stop his mouth from running away with any chance he has of coming off smooth and put-together. In desperation, he all but snatches the wet handkerchief she holds out to him and slaps it over his lower face, more to stop himself from talking than to clean the cotton candy off.

“Oh thank god,” she says, with a deep, relieved huff. “I hate it when I’m the only socially inept person in the conversation.”

Clint should be insulted, normally would be, but instead, he finds himself laughing, a deep chuckle muffled by the handkerchief. “Not big on polite conversation, huh?” he asks, using the handkerchief to clean his hands once he’s sure most of the stuff’s off his face.

“Oh no, very big on polite conversation,” the girl says with a rueful smile, and bends to pick up the remains of her cotton candy stick from the ground. She eyes it a little mournfully, and moves towards the nearby trash bin to throw it away. She looks over her shoulder with a tiny shrug. “I’m just chronically incapable of doing it.”

Clint follows her, even though the trash isn’t that far away, shaking the handkerchief out and handing it to her when she looks like she’s going to wipe her hands on her jeans. “Just don’t care about other people, or are you lacking the proper verbal filters?”

She takes the cloth back and cleans her hands, then tucks the end of it into her back pocket in a way that reminds Clint of mechanics keeping grease rags close. “Well, more of the latter than the former. But sometimes, people are just too much of an asshole to care about them, so both, I guess?”

“That’s fair,” Clint says equitably, then holds out his hand. “I’m Clint.”

“Toni,” she says, and slides her hand into his. Her shake is surprisingly firm, and her palm and fingers are callused, not soft like they look. “You from around here?”

Clint blinks in surprise. “You’re not?”

She shakes her head. “Nah. I’m on a bit of a road trip with someone, celebrating the end of the semester, I guess. I’ve never been to a carnival before, but Rhodey didn’t want to come. He has better things to do.”

Figures she’d have a boyfriend around somewhere. Disappointment sinks like a stone in his stomach. “Ah, so there’s no jealous type to lunge at me with threats to get away from his girl?”

Toni’s eyes go wide. “Rhodey? Ew, gross. No. He’s not my boyfriend. He’s my best friend. Roommate. Brother. Whatever.” She waves vaguely, dismissively. “He’s sweating about his thesis, so he’s holed up in the hotel studying. No lunging from overprotective family, I swear.”

Toni doesn’t look like she should be out of high school yet, let alone in college. Then again, he’s never actually been to a high school, so what the hell does he know? Before he gets in too far over his head, he decides to change the subject. ”So you’ve never been to a carnival? State fair? Circus?”

She tucks her hands into her back pockets, rocks back on her heels and shakes her head. “No,” she says. “I had kind of a … sheltered life. Is that weird?”

“I have no idea,” he replies honestly. “I know carnivals pretty well, though. If you want the full experience, I can show you around.”

Toni’s smile is tentative, but hopeful. “Yeah? You don’t mind?”

“Not at all,” he says, and holds out his elbow in exaggerated gentleman style.

She giggles, blushes, and slides her arm through his. “No jealous type to lunge at me with threats to get away from her man?”

Clint laughs. “Nah,” he says. “I am currently unattached.”

“Be my date for the evening, then?” Her tone is casual, bordering on flippant, but there’s a tremble of nerves in her smile. He’s not entirely sure what kind of idiots she’s been dating to this point, because she’s clearly way out of his league but is acting like he’s way out of hers.

He ignores the flutter in his own veins, smiles at her and says, “Toni, it would be my genuine pleasure.”

\----

They’ve spent only half an hour together, but Clint’s enjoying the hell out of every second. Toni is funny and snarky, and once she starts to trust that she can just speak whatever’s in her mind and won’t scare him off, she has a blunt, honest style of observation he finds absolutely hilarious.

She’s smart as hell too, that much is obvious at the first booth he takes her to, the bottle toss game. Silently thanking whatever cosmic force made him think to put his wallet in his pants tonight, Clint fishes a few dollars out for Sarah, the booth’s operator, glaring in warning at her when she gives him amused, raised eyebrows and takes the bedraggled bills from his hand.

He takes the baseballs Sarah holds out to him, narrowing his eyes one more time at Sarah’s wide grin, and then turns to Toni. “You wanna go first?” he asks.

Toni’s on her toes, leaning slightly over the counter, hands splayed with only her fingertips resting on the scarred wooden surface. Her eyes are darting every which way, forehead furrowed in concentration. “Sure,” she says, distracted, then bounces back down onto her heels. “Rules of the game?”

Clint resists the urge to shake his head in amazement. He’s still finding it a little hard to believe that there exists in the United States a girl who doesn’t know what bottle toss is. “You get three tries to knock all the bottles off the table,” he says. “If you knock ‘em all off, you get a big prize. If some of ‘em are left on the table, you get a smaller prize. If you don’t at least knock all of ‘em over…”

“I get nothing. Got it.” Still staring with intense focus at the bottles, her hand shoots out towards him, palm up, and she wiggles her fingers. He plops a baseball into her hand and watches her spin it with her fingertips. She’s muttering something under her breath, something with letters and numbers, but it’s too low for him to catch.

Toni shifts around some, rolling the ball between her cupped palms under her chin. She’s still mumbling things under his breath, _x_ ’es and _equals_ and something about distance and time. She readjusts her position for about thirty seconds, tiny shuffles that sometimes don’t even change her location by an inch, before she finally grins and says, “Okay. So, just throw?”

“That’s it.” He leans on the counter with an elbow to watch her, figuring that even if she misses all three pitches, he can get all nine bottles off the table with both hands tied behind his back and his eyes closed. She won’t walk away from this empty-handed.

Toni’s eyes flick between her feet and the bottles for another couple of seconds. Then, tongue poking between her teeth, she lets her hand fly in a smooth, overhand pitch that whips the ball forward. It crashes into the stacked bottles, dead center mass, and the entire stack topples over, bottles thumping onto the ground below the table.

Clint is, frankly, amazed. Sarah’s not the kind to rig her games — others in the venue do, but not Sarah — but the average person isn’t likely to nail the perfect shot on the first throw. Toni turns to him with an exhilarated grin, eyes sparkling, face flushed and pleased. Once again, an invisible hand slams into his ribcage and his lungs freeze, because she’s exquisite and it’s literally taking his breath away.

Whatever expression his face has, she misreads it, because her happy, relaxed smile falters, slips, slides away into an uncertain, cornered-animal sort of look. “Was… that not what I was supposed to do?” she asks, and whoever made her doubt herself to the point her tone goes that small and apologetic, Clint wants to find them and make a pincushion of their ass with a couple dozen arrows, just on principle.

“No,” he says, and gives her an easy smile. “That’s the ultimate goal. Just a bit surprising. Most people can’t do it on their first try.”

“Beginner’s luck,” she says, waving a hand dismissively, but her eyes won’t meet his and there’s a flush on her face. She's lying, but he doesn't call her on it. Part of what makes him such a good shot is being able to see his target, figure out the angles, find the spot best to hit with only a split second to calculate a myriad of factors. For some reason, that ability bleeds over to his skill at reading people. He can always figure out where to hit them to make them go down, and what to say to make them stay down.

He's willing to bet his best bow that Toni is a thousand percent smarter than she's letting on, but somewhere in her past is an authority figure or close friend who derides her for her intelligence, maybe even tells her to downplay it in order to fit in. They're probably jealous of her, but even if they're only trying to be helpful, the end result is still the same insecurities that make a person think the they need to adjust themselves downward for a world that simply isn't up to their standards.

He's contemplative as he watches Sarah pull down the stuffed panda in the stars and stripes uniform and hand it over to Toni. Watches her nuzzle it like a kid, delighted and overjoyed. When she tucks it under her arm and turns back to him, he smiles at her, schooling his face to show nothing of his thoughts. It isn’t his business unless she wants it to be. Whoever's treated her so shittily, Clint isn't gonna be one of them.

“Where to next?” she asks.

Clint thinks. “Well,” he says slowly, “you've got a lot of choices. There’s a whole host of games—” He sweeps his hand broadly left, indicating the lengthy row of booths, bustling with half-drunk Neandertals who stumbled out of the beer tent trying to impress their dates. “—appealing as that may seem.”

“Maybe later,” Toni says with slight distaste, following the motion of his hand.

He grins. “Or we can partake of the fine entertainment to be found in the funhouse, not half as scary as it claims to be, by the way. We can paddle a swan boat around the lake.” He hesitates for a second, then decides to throw all in and go for broke. “Or, since this is a date, we can do the very cliche thing and take a ride through the Tunnel of Love,” he says, with a nonchalance he isn’t feeling.

Toni ducks her head, burying the bottom half of her face in her new teddy bear. She mumbles something Clint doesn’t catch, muffled as it is by the bear’s stuffing.

“What?”

“I said,” Toni says, still muffled but louder and clearer. “I’ve never been on a date, so I wouldn’t know what’s cliche or not. It’s all new to me.”

For the third time in an hour, Clint forgets how to breathe. _Jesus, she’s not kidding about the sheltered life._ He makes a strangled, choking noise as his mind wraps around that fact, and continues choking when he suddenly recalls that _she_ asked _him_ to be her date. Her first date. Jesus Christ. He can only hope it’s by her choice, and not because she has overbearingly protective family members, or because she’s met no one but spineless idiots in her years.

Toni starts looking stricken, too-wide eyes and pale, pale skin. Maybe he should stop hitching and flopping like a landed fish and give her some reassurance that he’s not freaking out, and that she’s not a freak. “Okay,” he says, when he can. “Do you trust me?”

Toni eyes him, clutches the bear a bit tighter. “Yes,” she says, dragging out the _e_ like she’s trying to convince herself it’s the truth. “Why?”

He’s no great Lothario, but he knows his way around a first date, at the very least. His mind’s already planning the order of things. “Cos,” he says, and offers her his elbow again. After a moment’s hesitation, she slides her hand through, slim fingers cold against his forearm. “I’m not an asshole, and this is your first date. So we’re going to do this right.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> [@allthemarvelousrage on Tumblr](allthemarvelousrage.tumblr.com)


End file.
